OPNFV Functional Testing, TOSCA Orchestration, and vIMSUseCases

The entire purpose of OPNFV, an open source project from the Linux Foundation that brings together the work of the various standards bodies andopen source NFV projects into a single platform, is the provide a way for carriers and vendors to easily test and release virtual network functions (VNFs), and for users to understand what components will work together, so it’s especially important that the Functest team can provide appropriate test coverage.

This week Cloudify Director of Product, Arthur Berezin, together with OPNFV’s Morgan Richomme and Valentin Boucher of Orange Labs, spoke at the OpenStack Summit in a session titled “Project: OPNFV – Base System Functionality Testing (Functest) of a vIMS on OpenStack,” so we thought we’d take a moment to look at what that means.

About Functest

OPNFV puts a lot of emphasis on ensuring all components are fully tested and ready for production. TheFunctest group, specifically, is the team that tests and verifies all OPNFV Platform functionality, which covers the VIM and NFVI components.

The key objectives of the Functest project in OPNFV are to:

Define tooling for tests

Define test suites (SLA)

Installation and configuration of the tools

Automate test with CI

Provide API and dashboard functions for Functest and other test projects

But doing all that involves orchestration, and that involves having an appropriate tool.

Choosing an Orchestrator for Testing

The Functest team, as part of their use case testing, sought an orchestration tool based on certain criteria. They were looking for an open source orchestrator and VNF Manager. The tool had to satisfy a number of different requirements:

“To manage a complex VNF, it’s necessary to use an orchestrator and we selected Cloudify because it fits all the vIMS test-case requirements (open source solution, workflow,TOSCA modeling, good integration with OpenStack components, openness with plugins…).”

The second OPNFV release, Brahmaputra, includes test cases for more complete platform capacity checks of the OPNFV platform to host complex VNFs. In order to truly verify that everything is working properly, however, the tests needed a use case that was sufficiently complex.

VNF deployment with Cloudify, including create 7 VMs and installing and configuring software

VNF tests, including creating users and launching more than 100 tests

Pushing deployment duration and test results

If you’re interested in getting more details about the test cases, you can read more about the details on the Cloudify blog in this post contributed by the OPNFV team.

Joint Talk at OpenStack Summit

Cloudify Director of Product, Arthur Berezin, together with OPNFV’s Morgan Richomme and Valentin Boucher of Orange Labs, will be speaking at the OpenStack Summit in a session titled “Project: OPNFV – Base System Functionality Testing (Functest) of a vIMS on OpenStack.” The session, taking place on Wednesday, October 26 from 3:05pm-3:45pm, will include a lot more technical information about how Functest uses Cloudify within the vIMS use case from OPNFV.

The OPNFV team will be at booth D15 and Cloudify at booth C4 in the marketplace at theOpenStack Summit in Barcelona.